News
Local

Striking Steelworkers and Vale Inco Ltd. may not be talking at the bargaining table, but they will face off at least three times this week in legal and labour proceedings.

Two of the matters will be heard by the Ontario Labour Relations Board, the third in the Superior Court of Justice.

Tuesday, the OLRB will hold a hearing in Sudbury into a grievance filed against Vale Inco Ltd. by United Steelworkers about USW Local 2020 members being forced to do the work of striking USW Local 6500 members.

An OLRB hearing into the matter was to be heard in Toronto in December, but was postponed when two union officials were fogged in at the Sudbury airport.

Vale Inco has said about 50 members of the office and technical union at the mining company, USW Local 2020, have the core mining skills or better to do the work of striking production and maintenance workers.

Steelworkers filed a grievance saying forcing Local 2020 members to go underground violates their collective agreement with Vale Inco.

Steelworkers will meet with the OLRB in Toronto on Friday on a second matter, a pre-hearing conference related to the bad-faith bargaining complaint it filed almost two weeks ago against Vale Inco.

USW Local 6500 president John Fera and USW staff representative Myles Sullivan will represent the union at the Friday hearing, at which it is expected Vale Inco's response to USW's complaint will be heard.

USW filed the complaint Jan. 13, on the six-month anniversary of the strike by about 3,200 members in Sudbury and Port Colborne against Vale Inco.

In the complaint, the union charges Vale Inco contravened the Ontario Labour Act by demonstrating "a concerted determination and strategy masked in the language/conduct and demeanor of so-called hard bargaining of failing to meet the statutory obligation and standard of bargaining in good faith and making every reasonable effort to conclude collective agreements with the union."

The union is seeking relief in a number of ways. It is asking the labour relations board to order Vale Inco to meet with the union, with the help of a mediator and engage in "good faith bargaining and make all reasonable efforts to reach a collective agreement."

That includes "ceasing and desisting" from insisting upon refusing to change its position on pensions, the nickel price bonus and seniority rights.

It is also is asking the board to order Vale Inco to compensate the union and its employees for the damages "as a result of the loss of opportunity to have concluded a collective agreement prior to the date of the board's order and prior to the date of the to-be-concluded collective agreements.

On Friday, at least nine Steelworkers will appear in the Superior Court of Justice, charged with damages ranging from $75,000 to $120,000 for alleged actions on picket lines.

The strikers were served with statements of claim for blockading, harassment and intimidation and other picket-line behaviour, which Vale Inco says cost the company in lost production.

USW lawyer Brian Shell said earlier this month that, in his 28 years of practising labour law, he has never seen an employer file charges against individual union members for such alleged actions.

It is unheard of for companies to subject striking workers to legal action that could cost them their homes and other assets.

Fera expressed his frustration Sunday over Vale Inco spending more time trying to sue members over picket-line injunctions than it has bargaining.

Vale Inco has taken the United Steelworkers, USW Local 6500 and several strikers to court several times, alleging infractions of the picket line protocol established in July two weeks after the strike began.